A financial review of 2009 from A to Z

A to Z of finance in 2009: It was a year of Latvian blondes, the Bank of
England's magic wand and a great vampire squid.

Image 1 of 4

D is for Bernie Madoff, the Don of con artists

Image 1 of 4

K is for kettling, the police’s preferred method of containing the G20 rioters in the CityPhoto: GETTY

Image 1 of 4

O: Latvia held a parade of blondes wearing pink in an effort to cheer up the recession-hit nationPhoto: AFP/GETTY

Image 1 of 4

S is for 'giant vampire squid', as a Rolling Stone journalist called Goldman SachsPhoto: COML

By Jonathan Sibun and Alistair Osborne

6:22AM GMT 29 Dec 2009

A is for arse, as in “Fred Goodwin, my...”. Serial streaker Mark Robertsresolved not to turn any cheeks over the former Royal Bank of Scotland chief’s £17m pension pot. Clad only in black socks and shoes, the Liverpudlian decided the best form of protest was to “hold up” his local Halifax bank. Emblazoned on his back was the above slogan, plus a marker-penned arrow pointing downwards.

Other bankers were scarcely less out of step with the zeitgeist. Their idea of guilt was the gilts market, where bumper bonuses were underwritten by the Bank of England’s £200bn magic money programme(aka Quantitative Easing). By the end of the year, the new board of RBS – 84pc-owned by the taxpayer – was threatening to resign if it was barred from paying £1.5bn in bonuses. Many thought that was a cue for a kicking. One duly arrived: the Government’s Bank Payroll Tax. Was it sensible? My.?.?.

The sportswear industry always has more than a hint of the Del Boys about it, but 2009 was especially generous. JJB chief executive Chris Ronnie found himself out on his ear and out of a job after attracting the attention of the Financial Services Authority. Sir David Jones, appointed as the anti-sleaze chairman, took the rather surprising decision of accepting a £1.5m personal loan from Ashley, the Sports Direct tycoon and his rival. And just about everyone found themselves the subject of investigations by the SFO, SOCA, FSA and whatever acronym they use in Iceland.

Related Articles

C is for commitments. Paul Kemsley, the property mogul-cum-star of The Apprentice, claimed to have “other commitments” when he elected not to appear on the reality TV show fronted by Lord Sugar, everyone’s favourite enterprise tsar. It turns out Lord Sugar’s Rottweiler-in-chief wasn’t lying. Kemsley’s £500m empire went pop. He wasn’t the only one finding the going tough. Syrian tycoon Simon Halabi saw his property business collapse, while a title wasn’t enough to keep the Duke of Westminster out of trouble after he was forced to go deerstalker in hand to his bankers.

A symbol of the industry’s woes? British Land’s new marketing campaign: buy now, pay 2013.

D is for Don, the moniker fellow inmates at the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina awarded Bernie Madoff . “To every con artist, he is the Godfather, the Don,” said a fellow lag about the 71-year-old Ponzi supremo, banged up for 150 years for defrauding his clients of $65bn (£40.5bn).

Actor Kevin Bacon, Lady Rothschild and Lord Jacobs were victims of the man who had cheques for $173m in his desk at the time of his arrest. Madoff was surprised he was not found out sooner – a view shared by a whistlebower, who claimed the US Securities and Exchange Commission was “staffed by 3,500 chickens – and we need to get some foxes in here”.

As Madoff’s assets, including his yacht Bull, were put up for sale, the stories about him became increasingly surreal. Not least dropping his trousers to show staff how neat he was – behaviour not usually recommended in prison.

E is for Editor. David Oddsson, the former prime minister of Iceland, was offered the chance to rewrite history after being appointed editor of the country’s only broadsheet newspaper. Oddjob might be more appropriate.

His new employer didn’t seem worried by Oddsson’s standing on the world stage. The politician was previously listed in Time magazine’s choice of 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.

Still, the Icelandic meltdown did offer opportunities for the bargain-hunters. Baugur boss Jon Asgeir Johannesson was forced to hold a car boot sale of the retailer’s office furniture after the business collapsed. Such was the Man In Black’s fall from grace that he was spotted flying economy on the way to London. A hack described him as “grumpy and bad tempered”. Poor lamb.

F is for 14, the number of interviews Sir Win Bischoff had before climbing aboard that knackered black horse otherwise known as Lloyds Banking Group. Sir Win, 68, took over as chairman in July, long after Lloyds had demonstrated that its true priorities lay with its obsession with another F: flowers. While the bank floundered, with the taxpayer forced to take a 43pc stake, Lloyds spent hundreds of thousands of pounds renewing its sponsorship of the Chelsea Flower Show – the City’s tall poppy event.

Sir Win masterminded Lloyds’ record £13.5bn rights issuethat got the bank out of the Asset Protection Scheme, while trumping HSBC’s £12.5bn cash-call and the £12bn raid on investors by RBS pre the credit crunch. It actually went down rather well with investors, unlike the reaction at another F – Belgo-Dutch bank Fortis, whose annual meeting was enlivened by shareholders pelting the board with shoes and coins.

G is for game show, as in how one energy boss described an impending live TV auction to flogIraqi oil contracts. “Eurovision”was the other description and energy was very much in the spotlight in a year when most companies were doing their best to highlight their green credentials. Or to distract attention from their financial performances.

A rogue trader at PVM risked spoiling the oil broker’s financial performance as he lost £6m, which could well have been the cost of booking all those private jets that flew to the climate change circus in Copenhagen . Cue riots, South American hats, political arguments and not a lot of progress.

Losing the East Coast services triggered a comic second half of 2009 for NatEx. Having already rebuffed a bid approach from FirstGroup, it saw its hapless ex-chief executive Richard Bowker decamp to Abu Dhabi, while two other bidders came and went. One involved its major shareholder, Spain’s Cosmen family, which then tried to block its £360m rescue rights issue. Proving it can’t quite escape FirstGroup, its rival’s former number two Dean Finch is now taking the wheel at NatEx.

I is for impotent, as in “Dealing with Boeing would drive you mad. They’re like a middle-aged guy who’s impotent. They get naked but can’t finish it off.’’ No prizes for guessing who said that. Step forward Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary. He was already hacked off with the US plane maker for its unwillingness to modify the doors on the in-flight loo so he could charge passengers £1 a pee at 30,000ft – before his abortive negotiations to buy another 200 aircraft.

O’Leary’s difficulties were nothing, however, compared to those of fellow Dubliner Willie Walsh – the man in the British Airways cockpit . For the whole year, wee Willie was in a “fight for survival” (his own words) as the loss-making carrier lurched from one patch of turbulence to another. The year ended with a narrowly averted 12-day cabin crew strike. Unluckily for Willie, a fresh ballot is due in the new year.

J is for jealousy, as in what analysts were accused of for their “grand, grand over-reaction” to Dubai’s decision to play chicken with investors and the emirate’s $10bn debt pile.

Khalaf Al Habtoor, the chairman of one of the region’s biggest conglomerates, didn’t mince his words. Chanting anti-analyst slogans, Al Habtoor said: “They are the worst people on earth. I can say the word jealousy.” Well done him.

In a sign that all really was well with the world – or at least the Middle East – Abu Dhabi hosted a firework display that saw £12m go up in smoke. Which is exactly where the investors in Dubai thought their money had gone.

K is for kettling, the police’s preferred method of containingthe G20 rioters in the City who chose April Fool’s Day to heave a brick at capitalism. Vincent Tchenguiz, the property tycoon who spent much of the year at war with superwoman fund manager Nicola Horlick, took no chances: in a bid to remain a riot-free zone, he swapped his Rolls-Royce for a Smart Car.

By the end of the year, the question was not how to kettle protesters but the bankers and assorted entrepreneurs who were threatening to leave – up in arms over the new 50pc tax rate, the impost on bank bonuses and various regulatory crackdowns.

L is for Love, the unconditional love that even a man as vilified asDick Fuldknows is always there. “You know what, my mother loves me,” declared the ex-Lehman Brothers chairman in September, breaking almost a year’s silence.

The erstwhile Gorilla Of Wall Street, who ran the bank for 14 years, appeared uncharacteristically relaxed when a reporter tracked him down to his riverside hideaway outside Ketchum, Idaho. Clad in grey shorts, a black fleece and sandals, his opening gambit to her was: “You don’t have a gun; that’s good.”

Political aspirations aside, it wasn’t a vintage year for the Tory fundraiser. He also lost millions after an investment in Aim-listed betting firm TurfTrax went awry, and was forced to inject millions more (about 70 of them) into his spread-betting firm City Index after a number of clients “forgot” to pay their debts.

N is for nail, as in “I’ll nail you to the f---ing wall,” – the alleged words of Tony Verrier, the managing director of broker BGC Partners. Having defected from rival Tullett Prebon and allegedly persuaded 10 staff to follow him to BGC, Verrier was a touch annoyed when one, Mark Comer, asked if there was a “gentlemanly way” to get out of the agreement to leave.

In court, Verrier apologised for using “aggressive language”, while alleging that Tullett boss Terry Smith used private detectives – including one known as “The Beard” – to track his movements. He denied, however, that he had destroyed BlackBerrys allegedly used to orchestrate the exodus by “lobbing them into the Thames”. Verrier claimed he simply had “a reputation” for losing them.

O is for off, as in “I off-the-scale hate Gordon Brown”. So said Jon Wood, the founder of SRM Global Fund, who’s been miffed with the Government ever since it nationalised Northern Rock, the bank in which he had invested about £50m. The pugnacious investor held Brown not only responsible for that but for the entire financial crisis.

Thanks to their work with the national credit card, Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling have leftBritain facing a £178bn deficit, with the UK the last major economy to come out of recession. And, unlike Latvia, we haven’t even had a parade of blonde ladies in pink to cheer us up.

Where there is hate, though, there is also LUV – the shape of the economic recovery according toWPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell. He sees an L-shaped recovery in Europe, U-shaped in North America and a rip-roarer V-shape for the BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Gordon Brown et Al Darling were accused of cooking the books in the pre-Budget report, but in the Emerald Isle things were even more troubling as bank nationalisations and investigations of alleged malpractice flowed as freely as the black stuff . Should Ireland choose to leave the euro, the odds would be on a return to their old currency. Which brings us back to that punt.

Some even said so. The wonderfully named Godfrey Bloom MEP broke with years of tradition to heckleLord Turner at a Mansion House dinner . Many believed Bloom was upset about the FSA’s handling of the financial crisis. Others said the FSA chief’s crime was far more serious, claiming he had been wearing a clip-on bow-tie. Enough to get you strung up in some quarters of the City.

R is for Russell Reynolds, the headhunter that showed what ITV had been missing by turning the broadcaster’s search for a new chairman and chief executive into a soap opera.

After former BSkyB man Tony Ball exited stage left, having demanded up to £42m for becoming chief executive of the tin-pot TV company, the headhunter really got into its stride with its search for a new chairman. In a corporate version of Midsomer Murders, candidates for the job – including Sir Crispin Davis and Sir Michael Bishop – were serially bumped off before, amazingly, Archie Norman pitched up.

S is for squid, as in “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.

In an excoriating piece of gonzo-journalism, that is how Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi summed up Goldman Sachs , the Wall Street powerhouse whose many fans include Mike Morgan, a Florida-based investment adviser who set up a blog, goldmansachs666.com.

Fresh from repaying $10bn of rescue funding from the US taxpayer, the Goldmanites are on track for record profits this year and average pay packets of more than $770,000. All from “doing God’s work”, according to chief executive Lloyd Blankfein. Amazingly, vampire squids are no threat to humans.

T is for testicles. More specifically, those belonging to another T, David Tepper , the boss of New Jersey-based hedge fund Appaloosa Management. Theformer Goldman Sachs trader is set to collect $2.5bn – more than a third of the firm’s $7bn profit – after some ballsy bets that global banks would recover this year. He reportedly keeps a pair of brass testicles on his desk. If only it was that easy. The guys at Cazenove had to work for years to share £1bn.

U is for untimely, as in the death of Bruce Wasserstein. The Lazard deal-maker’s passing came as Cadbury readied its defences against another U – an “unappealing” takeover offer from “low-growth conglomerate” Kraft. Wasserstein was spearheading the Kraft assault. Bid 'Em Up Bruce lived up to his nickname by leaving a reported $2.3bn fortune.

Now, in a hissy fit straight out of the music biz, Hands wants a reckoning . He’s suing the Worm’s bank with a writ borrowed from I Want To Break Free by Queen (I want to break free from your lies/You’re so self-satisfied I don’t need you). Allegedly. Hands claims that, as an adviser to EMI, the Worm’s bank duped him into overpaying by inventing a rival bid. Unsurprisingly, both Citi and the Worm deny that.

X is for X-rated, which is one way of summing up the goings-on at Aviva. In an episode that did wonders for insurance’s staid image, it emerged that Andrew Moss, Aviva’s £1.8m-a-year chief executive, had left his wifeof 25 years for Deidre Galvin – his business director at the company’s head office in London. Galvin just happened to be the wife of Andrew Moffat, head of Aviva’s human resources for Europe. Gives a whole new meaning to the home of Norwich Union.

Z is for Zeewolde, home to the curiously named Spyker, the will-they-won’t-they saviour forSwedish basket case Saab. The auto industry seemed in a permanent state of indecision, withGeneral Motors gone one day and back the next. It was one way of stopping the workers striking – they never knew if they had a job or not.

The cast of auto victims read like a Formula 1 paddock – fitting, given the sport’s financial woes – with Porsche, Chrysler, Jaguar and Aston Martin running into trouble. Oh, and LDV.

At least there was justice. Ousted GM chief Rick Wagoner got to drive off into the sunset with an $11m retirement fund. The car-maker had picked up $30bn of bankruptcy financing so it was small fry in the scheme of things.